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Parenting Autistic Children: Catch 22

The previous post in this series told the story of my first encounter with autism at a special school where I did work experience for 6 months. Today, I would like to introduce the problems families face when they notice something wrong in their child’s development. As you will see, the way the system works puts them in a Catch 22 situation.

Bringing a child into the world is a very exciting event in every family’s history. Noticing that something is wrong with a child is not easy to experience. As I’ve said before, mothers of autistic children were blamed in the past for the situation by the claim they did not connect with their child during the first weeks after birth.

Most of those moms sighed in relief when the results of an experiment confirmed that autistic babies were different from “normal” babies.

In the first stage of the research, every mom was given recordings of her baby crying and asked to guess the reason for the crying. Most moms of “normal” babies guessed correctly, while moms of autistic babies didn’t. So, those who advocated for the “let’s blame the mothers” said, “OK, then. That’s our proof”.

But the experiment continued.

This post is part 2 of 2 in the series Autism

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Smile and Have a Nice Day!

My youngest sister sent me a gift recently. It was a book called Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment by Vicki Mackenzie. Gal, my husband, started reading it before me and I am reading it now 20-30 pages behind him. Every time he shared a suggestion from the book with me, I tried it. Tenzin Palmo suggested to the readers to find peace and happiness in different ways. Since I am in the happiness business, I have dedicated my life to finding techniques to increase happiness, methods to teach these techniques and ways to help others find their own techniques, so I welcomed her suggestions.

One of her simple methods was to smile. You smile widely (for no reason) and keep smiling through 3 deep breaths. Repeat this 6 times a day. That’s it. 3 breaths, 6 times a day, smiling. To start, you can put a pencil between your teeth, and this will hold your mouth in a smiling position.

Simple, right?

Tenzin Palmo said we’d feel a difference in 6 days, so I decided to try her technique myself.

It took exactly 1 day to feel a difference. The second day was even better, the third day was even better. If you are a mindful person and good at rating your moods, you will notice small changes every day. After a week, the improvement stopped and my happiness state was high and uplifted.

Try it. What have you got to lose (except some anger, sadness and fear)?

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Does Classroom Technology Improve Academic Achievement?

Technology, including classroom technology, is a very important part of our life in this day and age. When I had my first computer at the age of 24, my kids were born in a house with a computer that everyone could access whenever they needed. Today, we all have our own laptop and mobile phone (which is technically another computer).

Do you think that this technology improves their academic achievement?

I have been wondering for a long time whether the introduction of more classroom technology translates to higher academic success.

Recently, I saw some research done by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), whose mission is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. OECD ran an international study on the impact of introducing computers into the classroom on academic achievement and their conclusions were alarming.

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Make a List: Ronit’s Gratitude List

So now you know about the importance of being grateful and how you can get yourself into a state of gratitude with not much effort and in a very short time. You just need to make a list of 100 things you are grateful for.

Many of my clients say this is not an easy exercise. They can think of 10 or 20 things, but not a 100. So I give them examples of my own gratitude. Usually, when I start sharing my gratitude list with my clients, they say, “Oh, yeah, I’m grateful for this too”. I truly believe that all people have lots of things to be grateful for and if they struggle to find these things, it is only because they haven’t practiced doing it and maybe they need ideas.

I wasn’t in a state of gratitude all my life. Lucky me, at the age of 16, something (not very nice) happened to me and helped me shift my attitude from blame and complaining to appreciation and gratitude. From being a high school dropout, I changed to appreciating what I had and being able to recognize my skills and abilities. Within a short time, I got a scholarship for excellence. From that time onward, I changed my life to include an attitude of gratitude! From my experience, I can tell you that life smiles at me a lot more than before.

This post is part 38 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Make a List: Things to be Grateful for

In the last chapters of the make a list series, I covered many topics that can bring awareness, happiness and success for people. I already know many who have tried making those lists and have made a huge change in their lives.

One major aspect of success in life is gratitude. If you want to learn from happy, successful people, it is a good idea to imitate their beliefs, thoughts and mindset, and when asked about their success and happiness, successful people have gratitude as part of their life.

It is always amazing for me to hear successful people saying, “I am lucky”, “I am fortunate”, “I am so grateful”. Those people, who worked hard (and long) for their successes, never forget to appreciate the things they have. The difference between them and unsuccessful people is that they never take what they have or what they achieve for granted.

In life, you get more of what you focus on

Gratitude is a state of satisfaction, appreciation and happiness when you bring into your attention the good things you have in life. It is a very good way to handle difficulties in life.

This post is part 37 of 44 in the series Make a List

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Anger Management: What NOT to do when you are angry

Anger is a state of mind that prevents us from thinking clearly. When people are angry, they do and say things they regret later on. Anger is an emotional state that brings hostility with it.

I once saw a quote that says that anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. That helped me rethink my own anger. The problem with anger is the side effect of what we do when we are angry, so this post tells you what not to do when you are angry.

The secret to anger management is preparing in advance. If you pay attention and avoid the things listed below, you will be in a better place.

This post is part 3 of 3 in the series Anger Management

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Be Positive! Why? Because you worth it!

In recent years, we hear about being positive as a major aspect of happiness and success. Most people want to be positive, but don’t know how. When I talk to people about being positive, they say that they learned at school how to read and how to do basic math, they learned how to ride a bike and help at home, but no one ever taught them how to be positive. Therefore, it is one thing to understand why it is important to be positive, but another thing to actually be positive.

This is why I tell people that I should call my program Happy Being instead of Be Happy, because first we need to understand that happiness is important and then we need to learn how to be happy – how to make it a state of being.

Research done in North Carolina by psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found out that being positive is important not only for our immediate success but also for long-term happiness.

Lions and snakes

When we have negative thoughts, we activate the primitive brain. Over there, all we see are lions and snakes that are a threat. Our body goes into a “fight or flight” mode and shuts all other thinking mechanisms in order to focus on the threat in front of us. Thinking, analyzing, evaluating, prioritizing, connecting, thinking creatively and considering efficiency are all luxuries that the brain is unable to do while under threat.

Happiness does not reside in the primitive brain, so it is important to notice when you go there. If you are scared, angry, aggressive, withdrawn, anxious, worried or upset, you are in the primitive brain. Your body has taken over your mind and you are out of control.

Take a deep breath! Try to think of something good and happy. Go to a happy place in your imagination. You need to convince your brain that what is happening to you is not a real lion and not a real snake. Only after you do that, you can change your emotional state and start thinking clearly.

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Why Anti-Bullying Videos are Useless (even Bad)

A friend of mine, who is an author and writing about teaching kids empathy and compassion, asked me for my opinion on the role of anti-bullying videos in shifting attitudes towards bullying. Here is my answer.

I believe that many anti-bullying campaigns may reinforce bullying, rather than helping to stop or prevent bullying. Most of the anti-bullying videos show stories of victims being bullied, feeling bad, sad and rejected, and how a change of attitude makes them feel better.

My question is, “If kids (and not just kids) could put themselves in their victims’ shoes, they would never bully anyone. What is the point of showing them a video that tries to put them in others’ shoes?”

Well, there is no point!

People bully because they are weak and they do not have any other way that they could think of that could give them strength and power other than bullying others. They have seen someone around them do it – someone has done it to them or they have watched thousands of videos in which verbal, physical or emotional bullying is just a common (“normal”) thing and part of everything they see around them. So by showing another video of bullying, we show them how common it is, instead of showing them that the opposite is more common (“normal”). Campaigns need to focus on good relationships, caring and sharing to give kids the message that “kind = strong” and that “bully = weak”.

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How to Calm Anxiety: 25 Easy Tips

In What is Anxiety, I explained the process of creating anxiety. Today, I want to start describing how to calm anxiety with simple, everyday tips anybody can do.

It is important to remember that Anxiety is a thinking process that we do in the present of imagining a negative future. Anxiety is the modern evolution of the “fight or flight” response. We are not certain about the future and we predict a horrible one. Most of us are very bad fortunetellers, but still most people try fortunetelling in hope that the future will somehow change from being scary to being great, if only in our mind.

It won’t, unless we change the way we go through that process, and actively, with intention, change it!

In this post and the next, I will share with you 59 tips on how to calm anxiety. Each of those tips can do the trick for short time and if you continue doing them, they will become a habit. All you need are 2-3 tips that you feel conferrable with and alternate them.

Some of the tips are very much applicable to children, so teach your kids to develop strategies to manage and calm their anxiety as soon as possible. Research shows that kids as young as 3 years old already experience anxiety, and if they live in a very anxious house, they will master anxiety very early in life.

In schools, we see many anxious kids and this can be very exhausting for the body. Think of your body in “fight or flight” mode 30 to 40 times a day. An anxious child becomes so sensitive that every word said around them becomes a lion or a snake. The road from here to developing full-blown anxiety disorder is not too long.

This post is part 2 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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How to Deal with Anxiety: What is Anxiety?

What is anxiety? Anxiety is one of the biggest problems of our society today. Research has found that it is one of the main reasons for sickness, relationship problems, crime and failure. People who are anxious have a bad physical reaction to thinking about the future.

Everybody feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living.

The problem is with the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger. When people experience mild anxiety, we call it “worrying”. When the fear takes over and blocks the person from living a normal life, we call it “Anxiety Disorder”.

Think about it this way: anxiety is when your mind goes towards a possible, horrible, bad, unpleasant future and you react to it NOW. No one is anxious when they think about getting compliments, or having a great time. We are anxious about something that MAY go wrong in the future.

This post is part 1 of 3 in the series How to Deal with Anxiety

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